'They just closed it up and walked away'

8:34 AM,
Mar. 25, 2013

Written by

Michael Morgan

"They just closed it up and walked away," said Paul Pepper, founding president of the Friends of Fenwick Island Lighthouse. "They didn't tell anybody. When they left, they took the prisms, wiring, everything." In December 1978, the Coast Guard decided the Fenwick Island Lighthouse was no longer needed as an aid to navigation and shuttered the tower. For the first time in over a century, the beacon was permanently extinguished.

When the Fenwick Island Lighthouse was constructed a few yards north of the border with Maryland, the southern tip of Delaware was a dark corner of the coast that had ...